Record the signal, play it back. It's got the same 'flaws', perfectly. Reproduction is what I am referring to, not the _emulation_ of an analogue sound source

Record the signal, play it back. It's got the same 'flaws', perfectly. Reproduction is what I am referring to, not the _emulation_ of an analogue sound source. The difference between digital and analogue gear is that the imperfections in analogue gear make them interesting. i.e. instabilities in VCOs, the addition of harmonics etc. I am a big, big fan of old analogue gear and so I am definitely in the camp of 'we're not there yet' with the emulation of analogue gear. But, the idea that a digital signal can't replicate it, is nonsense, because obviously an analogue signal can be recorded digitally and perfectly played back. This is often the myth that is propagated, that the 'stair steps' somehow mean a loss of fidelity. Interestingly, and relevant to this discussion, I am yet to find any digital plugin that manages to do saturation properly. Plugins are often, seemingly, just using random number generators, rather than anything more complex (like the AI models you link to); Nothing comes close to my Thermionic Culture Vulture, or any of my other valve based equipment at creating that 'fatness'. I think that the AI approach is interesting, it does make me wonder how far we're willing to go to reproduce this in software, when the real thing is a handful of wires, resistors, capacitors, and transformers. It seems like trying to implement the ARM instruction set in Javascript. How much processing would a simple saturation plugin need? How many could one computer run?